Weaving the web
Date: 1999
Author: Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
Page IX:
Tim's innovatin is also unique. It has already provided us with a gigantic Information marketplace, where individuals and organisations buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services among one other. The press, radio and television never got close; all they can do is spray the same information out from one source towards many destinations. Nor can the letter or the telephone approach the Web's power, because even though those media enable one-on-one exchanges, they are slow and devoid of the coomputer's ability to display search, automate and mediate. Remarkably - compared with Gutenberg's press, Bell's telephone, and Marconi's radio - and well before reaching its ultimate form, Berners-Lee's Web has already established its uniqueness.
"And well before reaching its ultimate form", which form ? Is it the web 2.0 ? The semantic web ?
In 1999 Barners-Lee already knew the power of a many-to-many media. But his vision has been realised only six years later with the web 2.0.
Page 182:
The media may portray the Web as a wonderful, interactive place where we have limitless choice because we don't have to take what the TV producer has decided we should see next. But my definition of interactive includes not just the ability to choose, but also the ability to create...Intercreativity is the process of making things or solving problems together. If intercreativity is not just sitting there passively in front of a display screen, then intercreativity is not just sitting there in front of something "interactive"
Definition of the web 2.0 ? Definition of the web ! A vertical portal should focus on people interactivity.
See: Ideas: Stream of conciousness
Page 186:
Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint - the very processes from which 'society' arises. Computers help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration. Many social processes can be better run by machine, because the machine is always available, it is free from bias, and no one like to administer this kinds of system anyway.
The web help communities. Communities which even couldn't exist in real life. Vertical portals should help societies to arise.
Page 224:
My hope and faith that we are headed somewhere stem in part from the frequently proven observation that people seem to be naturally built to interact with others as part of a greater system … If we end up producing a system in hyperspace that allows us to work together harmoniously, that would be a metamorphosis. Though it would, I hope, happen incrementally, it would result in a huge restructuring of society. A society that could advance with intercreativity and group intuition, rather than conflict as the basic mechanism would be a major change. If we lay the groundwork right and try novel ways of interaction on the new Web, we may find a whole new set of financial, ethical, cultural and governing structures to which we can choose to belong, rather than having to pick ones we happen to physically live in. Bit by bit, those structures that work best would become important in the world, and democratic systems might take on different shapes.
Gathering people of a specific community in a specific structure. Why not in a vertical portal ? And what are the common needs of all these communities ?
Notes:
I noticed that Tim usually talked about "trusting". I think that a vertical portal offers a good range of trust to his community, because in your life you're used to trust members of your community.
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